“The November 30 update to the 2014 Recommended Anthropomorphics List is now online, and Dogpatch Press is included among the year’s Recommended Anthro Magazines. If you know of something good released during 2014 and it isn’t recommended yet, hurry up and recommend it!”

VOX rides the “furries” news spike that followed the MWFF attack. This is just a personal opinion but I have a problem about the approach. I feel it over-relies on the International Anthropomorphic Research Project to act more objective than it is. You could argue that this single source of a handful of Furry academics (not neutral ones) design info with advocacy, and do hobby research with “Scientist-sonas”. Surveys are loaded with debatable premises that come from overbearing influence of fashionable trends, rather than results. Over-labeling is an example: “Species Identity Disorder” may be better called Make-Believe.

It rationalizes about sex- “Only” half of furries are somewhat or more influenced by porn (so not even a majority aren’t.) The topic isn’t bad – it’s just sex. It’s not a Slippery Slope to bad things. It’s just one preference in Collective Individualism. (I try to avoid saying “we” when writing about furries to respect individualism.)

A fan outcast is remembered today by a mocking name (“Tumbles”) – can he get sympathy for another side of the story?

Yet I’m not shure it CAN even work the other way around. (Can my porn viewing habits influence my aesthetic preconceptions? How much aesthetically unappealing porn would I have to watch until I found it aesthetically appealing?)
But if Furry was defined by ones porn viewing habits, then this would have to work.

So I insist: Furry has in it’s heart nothing (!) to do with porn viewing habits.
Furry is this aesthetic appreciation of anthro characters. From this, everything else flows. Everything else is something entirely different.

You’re right, though. Even if Furry “were about” porn, that wouldn’t in itself be a slippery slope. I don’t see that at all.

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On the FRP-Front:
One shouldn’t discount the data, just because it seems to be “in your favour”. That always strikes me as pretty cynical.

I either make the effort to find faults in their methodology, or I admit I have no data. Everything else would just be conspiracy theory thinking. (“It’s got to be wrong because it seems to match the expected outcome of the researchers. Obviously this is all made up so they can sell their viewpoint to the ignorant masses. Wake up, sheeple!”) 😉

I think it’s an interest, not an identity. But it’s made of people, not ideas. If people claim a certain influence, then it is about that, for them. You can’t choose who else chooses the same interest as you, or say it has nothing to do with them. But with “collective individualism”, you can say they don’t represent you or speak for you.

There’s plenty of discussion about the survey methodology flaws. One of the researchers told me that certain questions being criticized were designed to “elicit response”. Like advertising and propaganda. They were loaded with built-in assumptions that weren’t even defined, to prepare expected answers before anyone speaks them.

For example, they separate a group of females apart from others, to prepare them for loaded questions that boil down to “how much sexism do you experience from the sexists that dominate our sexist culture?” It didn’t make any operational definition for sexism. That’s not science, that’s propaganda.

It’s built on religiously held assumptions that if a group has more males than females, it must be because they drove females out with bad behavior. That’s a false leap to conclusions, ignoring all other reasons that people get together. Common sense is all you need to know that this smells bad – and that’s not a conspiracy theory. It allows none of the reality of a culture of acceptance and support. It’s an insulting judgement against any group of 2 or more guys, or anyone who pursues a hobby out of interest.

Someone took a computer security paper about “female bots” and leapt to conclusions that it showed sexism. But when you actually read the paper, it says nothing at all about who does the behavior it discusses, how many or why. In fact it may be caused by all females attacking other females. Or a single Nigerian 419 scammer looking for money. Any other guess is equally valid as saying it represents anyone in our interest group.

When people leap to conclusions about “bad men” and design surveys to “elicit response” about those conclusions, it reveals that they spread religion, not science.